As the value and use of information continues to increase, individuals and businesses seek additional ways to process and store information. One option available to users is information handling systems. An information handling system generally processes, compiles, stores, and/or communicates information or data for business, personal, or other purposes thereby allowing users to take advantage of the value of the information. Because technology and information handling needs and requirements vary between different users or applications, information handling systems may also vary regarding what information is handled, how the information is handled, how much information is processed, stored, or communicated, and how quickly and efficiently the information may be processed, stored, or communicated. The variations in information handling systems allow for information handling systems to be general or configured for a specific user or specific use such as financial transaction processing, airline reservations, enterprise data storage, or global communications. In addition, information handling systems may include a variety of hardware and software components that may be configured to process, store, and communicate information and may include one or more computer systems, data storage systems, and networking systems.
Information handling systems may use one or more network interface cards (NICs) allowing the information handling systems to communicate via a network, e.g., a Local Area Network (LAN). For example, a single NIC may be used or a plurality of NICs may be used together. A plurality of NICs used together may be referred to as “teamed” NICs. Teaming is a technique in which multiple NICs are combined by using, for example, a driver, such that if a failure is detected along the path through a NIC in the team, subsequent LAN traffic may be redirected to and handled by the other NICs in the team. The group of NICs in a team may appear to the outside world as a single logical NIC.
NICs teamed by a Peripheral Component Interconnect (PCI) bus may yield greater redundancy against hardware failures than single NICs. NICs that have been teamed using teaming software from NIC vendors (e.g., BROADCOM or INTEL) may continue operating in the face of single failures of cabling, switches, or NICs if the failure does not result in an error signaled on the PCI bus.
Teaming is often used in servers because it may yield greater uptime, redundancy against hardware failures, and/or better performance in configurations where the team is also used for load balancing.
However, there is a class of hardware errors against which teaming typically does not protect. If a PCI express uncorrected bus error (reported as part of Advanced Error Reporting (PCI AER)) occurs due to a NIC failure, the teamed NICs, and in fact the whole system, typically will not continue operating because traditionally PCI bus errors are considered catastrophic, and as result an operating system (OS) will shut down or abnormally end. For example, an OS such as WINDOWS or LINUX will bugcheck or panic, resulting in a system halt.